On any given day, Steve Wilson will discover a tracking device lodged in the underside of a car.

In the past decade, he has assisted more than 40,000 victim-survivors of domestic abuse across the country, be it by locating hidden cameras in their homes, changing locks, sweeping phones and laptops, discovering obscure tracking devices tucked among their things (once, in a vape), or dismantling their iCloud.

“A lot of victims aren’t believed,” he tells Crikey. “If you go to a cop-shop and say, my smart-fridge keeps calling me a bitch, you’re seen as crazy.”

Before a victim-survivor ends up in a refuge, Wilson and his team will arrive at her emergency accommodation and perform a thorough sweep of her things. Just this morning, he had “six or seven jobs come in”. “I’ve had around 45 requests come in since Monday,” he sighs.

In a bid to stay safe, victim-survivors will remove themselves from the internet altogether, avoiding even banking apps and toll roads, disable location settings on their devices, delete online calendars, restrict their own access to myGov and more. “You have to remove the ability for a perpetrator to track and stalk his victim, as it’s one of the precursors to homicide,” Wilson stresses.

“A lot of people say, ‘maybe she should get off social media.’ No,” Wilson, CEO of the Protective Group — a specialty provider of safety solutions for victim-survivors of domestic abuse — argues. “That is her lifeline to community. He should get off her social media.”

On June 25 last year, the New South Wales government released a statement declaring “tech-facilitated coercive control” was on the rise. That same day, NSW crime commissioner Michael Barnes released findings that one in four individuals known to police who purchased tracking devices in the past 18 months have a history of domestic abuse. Such statements followed a 2023 eSafety literature scan, identifying that more than 99% of Australian family, domestic and sexual violence practitioners had met with clients who experienced technology-facilitated family and domestic violence.

Lenny is one such practitioner, a sexual assault counsellor based in Victoria. “Technology is advancing much more quickly than the system’s response to its [misapplication],” she states. She admits that maneuvering digital spaces is a delicate “dance between promoting and prioritising safety, but also disempowerment”, given that having victim-survivors lose “their access to online spaces is to also have them lose a form of living”.

Researchers Bridget Harris, director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre, and Delanie Woodlock, a senior research fellow at UNSW, refer to such abuse as “spaceless”, given it is “not bound by geography”. In this way, technology has allowed domestic violence to evolve into something ubiquitous, hardly constricted to place, time or physicality. Victim-survivors — who are largely women — recede from their digital communities. Unable to communicate with friends and family, maintain a professional presence on LinkedIn, access support services, transfer money or navigate online maps, they effectively find themselves exiled.

Jess Origlasso, a Melbourne-based model and domestic violence awareness advocate, is no stranger to technology-facilitated abuse. After an assault, Origlasso left the home she shared with her abusive ex-partner and sought refuge in an Airbnb. As she walked her two dogs near her accommodation that evening, she “had a funny feeling I was being watched”. “I later found out that he had accessed my emails and therefore, all of my Airbnb access information,” she tells Crikey.

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Long after their separation, Origlasso’s ex-partner attached her phone number to his Foxtel account. For months, Origlasso was harangued by Foxtel for failing to pay his bill.

“Eventually I got through to an agent. I explained that I had left an abusive relationship, and that I don’t have Foxtel,” she states. It was confirmed that the Foxtel account was paired with her ex-partner’s business address, but Foxtel insisted “there was nothing they could do”. A family member of Origlasso’s was able to make contact with her ex-partner, who eventually agreed to remove her phone number from the account.

However, a year later, Origlasso received a text message from an unknown number out of the blue. It was a brief “goodbye” note signed off in her ex-partner’s nickname, paired with a link to a private Dropbox folder. Worried, Origlasso called him immediately, forgetting to open the link. For five minutes, he abused her at length over the phone. Afterwards, despite trying to open the folder, Origlasso was not afforded access to it.

A couple of hours later, she received a message on Instagram from a past acquaintance with a link to that same Dropbox folder, saying, “Have you seen this Dropbox link? There’s heaps of porn of you in it.”

Distressed, Origlasso went straight to the police. “I wanted to report it in the context of domestic abuse, but [police] told me that there was a statute of limitations. I wasn’t allowed to talk about any of the abuse that had occurred,” she told Crikey. “Hearing from an abject stranger that they had access to naked photographs of me made me realise the scale of this. On Dropbox, you can see how many people have access to the folder. I was told there were hundreds of people there.”

Origlasso’s ex-partner was eventually charged and later found guilty of distributing intimate images and breaching intervention orders (IVO). Despite this, Dropbox has not removed the folder. Origlasso reported it to the service on August 26 last year. The following day, in an automated email, Dropbox claimed to have reviewed the content and “removed or disabled content that they determined violates our terms, policies or applicable law”. The folder remains accessible online. “The police have told me there’s nothing they can do about [Dropbox],” she states.

Nakshathra Suresh, cyber criminologist and co-founder of safety technology consultancy “eiris”, is critical of platforms — such as Dropbox — who abandon the needs of victim-survivors. She believes it is imperative that digital platforms deploy safety pathways into their architecture. “Often, victim-survivors feel they are unable to trust law enforcement, so believe they may be able to report instances of abuse to the platform [the abuse took place on] instead,” she tells Crikey. “But these platforms aren’t created with this type of safety in mind.”

“The cost of safety, for them, is greater than the cost of innovation. File-sharing platforms, like Dropbox, aren’t regulated by government entities,” she stresses. “For them, they believe they can still keep their platform up and running while not being responsible for what their users do on it.”

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Grace Tame, activist and advocate for survivors of child sexual assault, attests that “governments have known about the misapplication of technology from the earliest days that they were publicly available, and have done very little.” She agrees that “producers of apps are motivated by profit over protection”, making the internet a “lawless marketplace” for child sexual abuse material, among other things.

Without the means to report abuse, victim-survivors are instead left betrayed by apps and websites many of us rely upon.

Anastasia Powell, professor of family and sexual violence at RMIT, tells Crikey that “instead of the abuse stopping altogether, women victim-survivors of intimate partner violence often make themselves small. Retreating from social media, changing email addresses and mobile numbers, restricting their social circles, and carefully monitoring the information that they share with anyone about their address or aspects of their life.” Powell considers such digital exclusion in and of itself a “form of modern-day inequality”.